BCM Welcomes the Danish String Quartet to Kick Off Its Spring Series

This is the time of year when Marya Martin, founder and artistic director of Bridgehampton Chamber Music, is gearing up for the new season ahead.

It’s a season that begins this weekend with BCM Spring, a series of three concerts offered in the coming month that welcome warmer days by highlighting music that speaks to the emotional and complex lives of the composers who wrote it.

Martin is particularly thrilled that the 2025 spring series is kicking off with a performance this Saturday by the Danish String Quartet, a group of four musicians who are redefining the meaning of chamber music and also branching out by exploring the traditional folk music from Scandinavia.

“I’ve known about them, I went to hear them and tried to get them for the last three years. They’re very much in demand,” said Martin, who is herself a flutist. “They do two tours of the U.S. a year. We have them on April 5 — on April 4, they play Carnegie Hall.

“In my mind, they are one of the best string quartets in the world. They’re unusual in their approach to music,” she added. “There are not a lot of huge gestures, it’s a flip of eyebrow and they do really interesting programming. They also do a bunch of Danish folk music, which almost sounds like Appalachian music. In one concert, they did an arrangement of a Beatles tune — it was so serene and amazing. Their four instruments play like one. It’s like music should be and we all strive to be.

“They love their art form. They’re serious and thoughtful. For four of them to be so aligned in their interpretation is just unusual for musicians,” she added. “The craziness is they are at Carnegie Hall on Friday and by contract weren’t allowed to play within New York City on Saturday, but they could come here on Saturday.”

At the BCM concert, which will be held in the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, the Danish String Quartet will perform a program of two major pieces — the first is Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15 in G major, D. 887.

“Shubert’s No. 15 for string quartet is the last one he wrote in 1826 when he was in his 30s,” Martin said. “It’s an incredible piece of music and it wasn’t published until 30 years after his death because his brother sold the manuscript to a publisher who forgot about it. It’s considered one of the greatest string quartets of all time.”

The second piece that will be performed by the Danish String Quartet on Saturday is Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 4 in D major, Op. 83.

“He was a real political activist in Russia,” Martin explained. “At the time of this writing, he had lost his job at the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatory and his music had been banned by Stalin. He started writing film music based on folk tunes. He figured folk music is uncontroversial, you can’t mess with it.

“What’s so incredible is for him, the Jewish folk music was the more interesting. At the writing of this piece in 1949, the communists and Jews were aligned as the new intelligentsia. When he finished the quartet based on Jewish folks songs, the elite had turned against Stalin and Stalin’s anti-Semitism bubbled to the surface,” she said. “He played it in his living room, then put it away for five years because he knew it could be the death of him if he played it publicly. After Stalin died, it was played.”

For the Danish String Quartet, the music of the Russian composer has been a major focus of their repertoire.

“We’ve been working quite a lot with Shostakovich because this year is 50 years since he died,” explained Danish String Quartet violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørenson in a phone interview from Denmark. “We have a big theater concert premiering here in Copenhagen at the end of May, we’ve been working a lot with his music and been through most of his pieces for string quartet.

“The striking thing is he wrote 50 of them in total and every one of them is a masterpiece in our opinion,” Sørenson continued. “It’s such a strong impact every time we play one of his pieces. We can relate to the emotions he describes.”

In terms of Shubert, his music has also figured prominently in the Danish String Quartet’s wheelhouse as of late because of a multi-year commissioning project the quartet just completed. Called Doppelgänger, the initiative paired world premiere compositions by four modern-day composers with four of Schubert’s late pieces for string quartet and quintet.

“The G major is my favorite piece by him and it’s such a marvelous piece of music,” Sørenson said of the work he and the quartet will present in Bridgehampton on Saturday. “It’s super long, he stretches time in a way that’s so unique. With all the things happening in the world, I think it’s important to forget what’s happening and devote yourself to the music, and I think no one is better at that than him.”

The Doppelgänger project came about right after the Danish String Quartet had come off its five-disc Prism project, which explored the relationships between Bach fugues, Beethoven string quartets, and works by Shostakovich, Schnittke, Bartók, Mendelssohn and Webern.

“We needed some other really great and big music to work with for string quartet, and Shubert was obvious to us,” Sørenson explained. “We wanted to play that — his last three quartets and string quintet.”

Like with the Beethoven project, the quartet also wanted to see if they could shed new light on Schubert’s music in the process.

“We felt it was also important to contribute, so we asked four composers to write pieces that reflect on the Schubert piece they got paired with. It’s been a nice project.”

The result of Doppelgänger is four completely different new pieces that each reflect on one of Schubert’s compositions.

“It was interesting. In the first phase of this project, we reached out to favorite composers and were lucky enough that they all said yes, that was amazing,” Sørenson said. “Then we came up with a timeline. We were quite fortunate in that we needed every composer to match with a Shubert piece and that came easy. Bent Sørensen grew up listening to the Quartet in G major and it was his favorite piece as a child. OK, that’s perfect. And Anna Thorvaldsdottir, she wrote a piece alongside Schubert’s “Rosamunde,” and the Finnish composer, Lotta Wennäkoski, chose Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” and wanted to do a piece that was the story of the girl. The last composer, Thomas Adès, said he didn’t want to write a quartet, so he wrote a string quintet to go with Schubert’s Quintet in C major, so it all aligned.”

When asked if Doppelgänger will be available as a recording, like the Prism project was, Sørenson responded, “At the moment, no. We did have a planned recording session in December but the hall canceled on us. So right now, I think it’s going to be something that will stand only in a live performance version.”

Which is why East End audiences will be fortunate to hear the Danish String Quartet perform a Schubert string quartet that is part of the Doppelgänger project.

“We like this approach to programming a lot,” said Sørenson of the group’s recent projects. “It’s important to us not to repeat ourselves, and that way of thinking leads us to trying to see how we can do something with these old pieces that have been performed for hundreds of years. There have been 2,000 recordings of Beethoven’s string quartets. How can we contribute in that pool of great recordings with our take on it? It’s important to present a very known composer in a way that feels good and personal.”

The Danish String Quartet’s approach to music — both in terms of classical pieces by well-known composers and the enchanting Nordic folk tunes — have endeared them to a wide audience. The quartet was even invited to perform a Tiny Desk concert at NPR in 2014, a prestigious venue indeed.

“We had no clue what it was before we did it and especially after we did it,” Sørenson admitted. “At the time, it didn’t break through in Denmark, but now people know what it is. For us it was new. We didn’t know what to expect, then all a sudden these videos get played. It’s acoustic and so alive, and such a great idea. We were really happy to be doing it.”

The Danish String Quartet performs as part of BCM Spring on Saturday, April 5, at 5 p.m. at Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, 2429 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton. Tickets are $75, $50 and $10 for students at bcmf.org. BCM Spring continues on Saturday, April 26, with “Spring’s Clarity,” a program featuring works by William Grant Still, Eugene Aynsley Goosens, Grażyna Bacewicz and Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in C minor. The series concludes on Saturday, May 17, with “Mahler and Brahms,” a fantastic journey from Mahler’s darkly-hued Piano Quartet and Belinda Reynold’s propulsive trio for flute, cello and piano, to Brahms’s heart-racing Piano Quartet in G minor.